


HALO THE NINTH

by gomollusk



Series: HALO THE NINTH [1]
Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms, The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, F/M, Halo au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26808727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gomollusk/pseuds/gomollusk
Summary: The cavaliers are a chosen few; unparalleled soldiers altered by genetic engineering and a lifetime of training. Paired with their necromancer, they are a force of unprecedented military might. But will they be enough to defeat The Covenant, a massive alien adversary the likes of which the nine houses have never faced before?Yeah, probably.
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: HALO THE NINTH [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955242
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	HALO THE NINTH

She came down planetside like a wolf on the fold. Her drop-pod was the worst weapon the Mithraeum could launch, for each bomb in its instantaneous slaughter would be a mercy compared with what she brought to bear. She was the fiercest warrior of the Ninth House, its Cavalier primary. To rain Gideon Nav was to rain death. The fresh corpse-paint was still drying on her assault armor, the skull a bright white atop matte black titanium alloy and breathable, scaley mesh. The whole suit was painted over with bones in their approximately correct locations, but Gideon couldn’t help but giggle as Harrow Nonagesimus, necromancer primary of the Ninth House, Reverend Daughter, keeper of the sacred tomb, painstakingly illustrated her. 

“Hey, don’t forget to give me a huge penis bone.”  
“Choke on a penis bone,” Harrow hissed before exhaustively explaining to her captive audience why a penis bone did not and could not exist. Gideon was still smirking at the thought when terminal velocity shook the pod.  
“Contact in 30,” her necromancer voiced, all business.  
“Bitchin,” She unsheathed the longsword on her back. Soon purple blood would run in rivulets down the gutter of her most prized possession.  
“Gideon,” Harrow intoned, “What. Is. That.”  
“It’s a longsword, dipshit.”  
“I know what a longsword is, you mistake of nature. Why, by the ninth, did you bring it in the drop pod?”  
“To kill space aliens?”  
“Who have guns, Gideon! They all have guns! We all have guns! Every cavalier has a gun! Except, apparently, you!” 

In her armor Gideon felt surrounded by her necromancer’s screams and wished, as she often did, that her assault armor had a little volume knob somewhere. She wanted to come up with a witty retort but then, Harrow, remembering herself, informed her precisely 200 milliseconds too late: “Contact!” as Gideon’s pod collided with the soil of the ring-world like a hot knife through 200 feet of soil and some grass and small animals.  
“You’re not going to last a minute out there with an antique, Nav.”  
“Watch me.” 

Gideon, along with the other Cavaliers in various stages of descent onto the surface of the ring-world, had been briefed at length about Covenant units, their multi-species organizational structure, and their tactics. Unlike the others, Gideon fell asleep during the slideshow. What she knew for certain was that the group headed towards her was comprised of six, spherical, ridged little nuggets with glowing purple guns. They looked eminently killable and who was she to deny them? She launched herself from the smoldering wreckage of her drop pod and bisected the one closest to her in a long, clean strike. Its comrades, all of them armed, and, presumably, soldiers, nonetheless threw their hands into the air and ran. They had high-pitched, little voices and it made Gideon grin when they screamed. She chased them down less like a wolf on the fold and more like a dog on half a dozen heavily encumbered squirrels. 

“This would be faster with a gun.”  
“Reject modernity,” Gideon said as one of the grunt’s heads sailed through the air, “Embrace tradition,” she skewered three of them running in a little line.  
“This proves nothing,” Harrow said unyieldingly as Gideon gutted the final member of her welcoming committee. As she withdrew his little hands clutched what must have been the equivalent of his intestines. Trying, in vain, to push them back into his spherical body. “Back to the nipple,” he whispered and died.

“Ok,” Gideon admitted, “I tuned out on the briefing. What the fuck was that about?”  
“I have absolutely no idea,” Harrow admitted, which was rare for Harrow. “I’ve marked Hect’s dropship coordinates on your map, Nav. Find her and between the Sixth House necromancer and I, we should be able to locate the rest of you. Then we’ll launch a counter-offensive and figure out just what you’re standing on.”  
“A planet? A ring planet?”  
“This doesn’t have the thanergetic flow of a planet, Nav.”  
“Then what is it?”  
“If I knew, I wouldn’t need Palamedes Sextus to find out.”  
“Ooh, a battle of the nerds. My bet’s on-“  
“Just move, Nav!” and she did.

For something that wasn’t a planet, the ring-world had a lot more life that Gideon had ever seen on the ninth. It was the clearest sky she had ever seen. The trees alone were beyond belief, the pines almost hypnotic. She wondered a little indulgently what it would feel like to strip off her armor and lie in the grass. Probably really good actually, but hardly productive. No. Gideon would kill and keep killing and press the buttons Harrow told her to press and with those buttons would come complications and Gideon would kill those complications too.

She could move very quickly. Not that she wasn’t fast before, having been put through her paces by Harrowhark since her Osseusity was the humble age of six, but having now survived the Cavalier program and its heavy gauntlet of specific and incredibly painful bits of genetic engineering combined with the surprisingly spry and responsive movements of her assault armor, Gideon was the fastest she would ever hope to get. Without a car, that is. In the wreckage of a Pelican carrier she saw it, still in one piece: a warthog.  
“No. Absolutely not.”  
“Harrow!”  
“I’ve seen your scores on the modules! No! Gideon, listen to me right now, under no circumstances are you to-“

A majestic albino pangolin rose from her den. Springtime had come and with it the promise of abundance; nourishment for her and her young and shelter for months to come. She took the first steps out of her burrow with tentative care and sniffed. Insects were out in full and her children would be delighted by her quarry, she began to dig even as the rumbling drew closer, and was working very diligently when a military grade wheel rendered her into a fine, red mist.  
Gideon yopped. And on a massive space-ship far above the surface, Harrow winced to hear her yop. 

“Hard right. Hard right! Gideon. Gideon you’re breaking the car.” She was, but she wasn’t concerned. If this one broke she’d find another. There was always another car. The wheels handles the hills and valleys of the ring-world perfectly. Although an imperfect driver, she relished the terrain, adjusting with every wrong turn into a tree and somehow not biting her tongue off in the process. Over the hill she heard gunfire, both the familiar sounds of Cohort weaponry and the unfamiliar screams of the Covenant’s guns. “Round two,” Gideon murmured as she crested into the valley just in time so see Camilla Hect vault from out of cover. She and the cohort soldiers she was with were pinned down but the Cavalier charged nonetheless, beams ricocheting across her ornate grey assault armor. In her hands were two curved blades.

“Hey, Harrow.”  
“Shut up.”  
“See what she’s got there?”  
“I entreat you to shut up.”  
“Those look like guns to you? Really weird guns.”  
“Just help her, you fucking brain tumor.”  
“Aye, aye.” Gideon accelerated. 

The cohort, in their infinite wisdom, had dropped something on the ringworld less merciful than a bomb and more precise than any army. Eight pods had landed on the planet that was not a planet, each one containing a Cavalier; a soldier enhanced with the greatest genetic engineering a civilization could buy, governed by the most powerful necromancers of their house. Just one of them landing was so terribly unfair. But all of them had landed, and soon the Covenant would know each and every one of them as arbiters of death.

**Author's Note:**

> I will keep writing this until I stop finding it funny. Until then I cannot be abated or delayed. More to come.


End file.
